2017 is the fifth year we published statistics about the Java landscape. Every year, during springtime, we dig into the data that we have gathered from the JVMs Plumbr Agents have monitored, and find out:

Which Java versions are used (Java 6 vs. Java 7 vs. Java 8).

Which JVMs are used (Oracle Hotspot vs. OpenJDK vs. Rest Of The World).

How the landscape has changed over time.

This year. our conclusions are based on 1,400 different JVMs that Plumbr monitored for performance during March and April 2017. The data has been gathered from within the JVM via System.getProperty() calls with os.arch, os.version, java.version, etc.

Java Versions Used in 2017

This is now finally the year where Java 8 became the most popular environment. Having lost last year by just a fraction of a percent, Java 8 this year had double the number of deployments than Java 7:

Also notable are the missing elements. Java 5 is gone for good and there was exactly zero early access Java 9 builds among the deployments we received data from. With the recent turmoil around its core Jigsaw module, it might be reasonable to wait until the dust has settled before jumping onto this bandwagon.

Java Versions Used 2013-2017

The picture looks more interesting if we look at the trends over the four years. Presenting the same data over the five-year period starting from 2013. As we have conducted this study now for over five years using the same methodology, we see the following trends:

The number of Java 6 deployments keeps shrinking 2x each year for the fifth year in a row. Considering that Java 6 was already EOL’d in March 2013, it is definitely agood news. Java 7 usage peaked at 2014 and is also in clear decline, leaving Java 8 as the clear winner.

JVM Vendors in 2017

The next analysis opens up the data we have about different JVM vendors. If you recall, Java declares a standard any vendor can decide to implement when building a Java Virtual Machine. In theory, we should thus see a large variety of different JVM vendors, but in practice, we have the following:

No matter how you would interpret the data, the conclusion is the same: There are two JVMs with large deployment base: HotSpot and OpenJDK.

The “Other” category consisted of five different JVM vendors, each represented by five or fewer JVMs in the dataset. These vendors included Oracle JRockit, IBM J9, SAP Java Server VM, Zing, and SAP VM.

If you found the data interesting, you are likely to enjoy our next week's post about Java EE container statistics as well. To be notified, subscribe either to our Twitter or RSS feed.

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